This week a book I co-wrote with Tim Hitchcock was published. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800, published in print and as an eBook, is intended to have an original argument which stresses the agency of ordinary, plebeian Londoners against the power of the state. In parallel, we aimed to publish the eBook in an innovative format which enables the agency of the reader in spite of our presumed authority as academic authors, but we came up against the unwillingness of the publishing industry to innovate.

The historical argument of the book stresses the role which the lowest status Londoners, the poor and the criminal, played in shaping modern social policy. We argue that the significant innovations in social policy, both in criminal justice and poor relief, which occurred during the eighteenth century resulted from the pressures, the agency, of plebeian Londoners.

Likewise, the eBook is meant to give power to its readers. Our research made extensive use of the extensive array of primary and secondary sources now available on the internet, and our publication plan involved the creation of an eBook edition with extensive online links to the evidence we cite.

We wanted readers to be able to click through from the manuscript and printed sources we quote in the text to online editions of these original sources, such as the London Lives and Old Bailey websites we helped create, and to click through from a table or graph to the underlying spreadsheets containing the data.

The reader would then be given the evidence to question our interpretations, come to different conclusions, or simply follow their own interests through the linked sources. The book we wanted to create would be so extensively interlinked that we would cede control of the narrative and our authority as authors could be challenged by readers following their own agendas.

We took the book to a major academic publisher, thinking that, like us, they would want to experiment with the new affordances of electronic publishing. Faced with the twin threats of open access and online self-publishing, we thought that any publisher would embrace this opportunity to innovate.

But our publisher had other ideas. They agreed to publish an eBook alongside the print editions, but their idea of an eBook was little more than a photographic edition of the printed text. Like most current eBooks, it would essentially have the appearance of a pdf file, with a limited number of external links to trusted sources. And their production methods prioritised the printed book, with the eBook expected to follow obediently behind. Because this publication method failed to allow for our ambitious plans for hyperlinks, the book’s production schedule was delayed, ultimately by more than a year.

Despite numerous compromises, the end result is readable, mostly in the way that we intended, and we look forward to hearing how readers engage with it — and to their challenges to our arguments. But ultimately our attempt to reshape the future of the book, to convince our publisher to embrace the technical possibilities afforded by electronic publication, was unsuccessful. It will take more than a couple of uppity academics to convince the publishing industry to exploit the full potential of the eBook.

11 Comments

Perhaps this is indeed a missed opportunity for the (unspecified) press. But the authors, in choosing to publish with a traditional academic press, must also take responsibility for the outcome. The press (CUP) does not seem an obvious choice for authors looking to ‘reshape the future of the book’: surely a more congenial publisher could have been found.

Would you mind sharing whether or not the obstacle was technical or ideological? For example, was the ePub itself meant to act as a web browser and display the external sites, (something I don’t believe ePubs have the capacity to do) or would it redirect to the default browser on the reading device? I work on the digital side of a university press (Virginia) and we often include links to digital humanities collections in our eBooks. Is it possible that you faced the ePub v. stand-alone mobile app conundrum? I’m extremely sympathetic to the cause of improving possibilities in digital reading, but the technical limitations of the ePub and the cost/complexity of developing a mobile app that will respond as well as the ePub on a diverse array of devices seem to be what’s holding the industry back. I’d love to hear more about your vision.

The problem was not technical; the publisher regularly publishes more adventurously with the types of features we were looking for in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) subjects, but it was not prepared to do so in the Arts and Humanities. We wrote the book on a wiki (PMWiki), which allowed us all the features in terms of links to websites and databases that we wanted, and produces an attractive online edition of the book, but because the publisher started with the printed book version and then tried to replicate that online, all sorts of problems were encountered. In my view publishers are not going to change unless Arts and Humanities scholars start demanding such additional features on a regular basis.

Hi:
I too have written a book. It is about about education and learning and I would like to publish it as a free e-book as follows – as a wiki where I can continuously update the material, as a blog where people can leave comments about content they are interested in and with links where I can make some money with pay per clicks.. My book is very visual and would be too expensive to publish in print.
Any thoughts or help with someone that would know how to do this or at least be interested?
Thanks so much
Professor Glenn Doolittle
Santa Ana College

I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own blog and was wondering what all is needed to get setup? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny? I’m not very web smart so I’m not 100% positive. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated. Appreciate it

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